Before the wildfires tore through the Altadena community of Los Angeles County, there were 12 houses on Winrock Avenue.
Now, half remain, including one that is home to Debbie Slavin. The first six houses on her block are gone, she said.
“And then there’s my house that just is standing out there,” she said. “And you just have to ask yourself, why?”
While she is, of course, grateful, Slavin said, she is also overcome with grief and guilt for the many people — friends, neighbors and strangers alike — who are among the tens of thousands who have been displaced.
“I am so, so, so saddened by the loss that everyone is going through and what they have to go through,” she said. “It’s so heartbreaking.”
As of Wednesday, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, more than 12,000 structures had been destroyed in the fast-moving Los Angeles-area fires that erupted last week. The blazes, fueled by dry conditions and powerful winds, have upended communities as they’ve turned home after home to rubble and left residents to struggle with what comes next — whether and how to rebuild.
Slavin and her neighbors on Winrock formed a tight-knit community: They would keep an eye on each other’s properties when one of them went on vacation, have potluck gatherings and watch fireworks from their block, which she said has provided “prime seating” of the nearby Altadena Town and Country Club’s annual July Fourth fireworks display.
In conversations over the last week with her neighbors who have lost their homes, Slavin said, she has kept the focus on them, avoiding any talk of the smoke damage she will eventually have to contend with at her home or of her guilt at having escaped greater loss.
“I felt very, very sad that they lost their homes,” Slavin said. “I didn’t think about my home. It was more thinking about them and how this was impacting them.”
But in private, she said, she has looked to her faith to try to make sense of why her home didn’t perish.
A pastor at her church called it “random grace,” she said, noting that fires destroyed the homes of others who, like her, had “prayed for their houses” and the area.
A fence caught fire outside Slavin’s 1961 midcentury home, causing a pipe to burst and spew water on the house, she said. She believes it stopped the flames from spreading farther. The home’s interior will need smoke remediation, but it’s otherwise OK. Slavin, who is staying with a friend about 20 miles away for now, said she plans to return with her dogs, Skylar and Snickers, once it’s safe to do so.
Jennifer Gray Thompson, the founder and chief executive of After the Fire, a nonprofit that helps communities recover from massive wildfires, said people like Slavin who escape what might be considered the worst outcome in a tragedy like a fire often struggle with the “very real and very profound” feeling of survivor’s guilt.
“People who lost their homes, but not their lives, feel guilty complaining about their homes because they’re aware that other people lost their lives,” she said. “And then people who didn’t lose their homes or a family member feel guilty for saying anything about their own trauma, because they’re like, ‘I have a home to go to, so why am I so traumatized? So I’m just not going to deal with it.’”
Enrique Balcazar had to contend with that emotion when he returned to his destroyed Altadena neighborhood after evacuating the devastating Eaton Fire.
“Everything was on the ground, burned, all of the houses,” he told Telemundo. His under-construction home was the only one on its block still standing.
He thought, “I don’t deserve this,” he said. “I don’t feel like I deserve anything more than any of my neighbors.”
The fires have killed at least 27 people and are among the most destructive in California history. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said Wednesday that it had registered more than 49,000 people for federal aid.
Kip Katz said he still can’t make sense of why the Altadena home he shares with his Akita dog, Kuma, was unscathed. He’s lived in the 1954 rambler for 25 years.
“It doesn’t seem real,” he said.
He believes the Altadena Golf Course served as a fire break for the houses below it — like his — and those immediately to the west of it.
“It’s not because the golf course was overwatered or anything like that,” said Katz, 55, who is staying with his girlfriend in Pasadena, about a mile and a half from his home. “It’s just, it’s a big open space that the fire can’t travel across.”
The majority of the structures north of the golf course are gone, he said.
Katz walked the neighborhood Sunday and said he was unable to process what he was seeing.
“It looks like a movie set, because there’s some houses still standing, and then other blocks are just completely gone,” he said. His local hardware, pet and grocery stores are among the buildings destroyed.
Even though he will be able to move back in as soon as it’s safe, he can easily rattle off all the ways his community may never be the same.
“You start to think about all the effects it has. Where are all these kids going to go? All the elderly people that lost their assisted living facilities and the convalescent facilities, they’re all gone. So where do those people go?” he asked. “And then all the people in the middle that have to take care of those groups, is just, it’s unbelievable.”
An East Coast native, Katz said he was attracted to Altadena’s rich culture.
“Altadena is also this really eclectic, unique community of everything from really poor, lower-class communities to, you go a mile or two to the east and you have billionaires, literally,” he said. “It’s a small town, but you have this huge mix of cultures and everything else, and it’s just very unique to have all that in a very small community.”
Now he wonders if it’s even possible that a vibrant community will ever surround his spared home again.
“I don’t know how we rebuild. I don’t know how people navigate all this,” he said. “I don’t know how we get back to being a community.”
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